


Inosculation

by Zigzagwanderer



Category: Hannibal (TV)
Genre: Post-Fall (Hannibal)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-02-06
Updated: 2019-02-06
Packaged: 2019-10-23 11:38:01
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 651
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17682713
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Zigzagwanderer/pseuds/Zigzagwanderer
Summary: an afterlife/another life...(My contribution to the wonderful After The Fall Zine, thanks once again to the organisers for letting me be a part of it.)





	Inosculation

Mist erases the mainland, all over again. Compass reeling, the deck dances. 

“You live here, right?” The other passenger sirens him a smile. “In elemental truth.”

Will sighs into his cardboard coffee cup. Not that she’s wrong. 

Like every spiritual tourist, she is sheened with spindrift and rapture. The islanders erode differently, roseate and rusting, and Will supposes his own lustre is liminal, six months in. 

“When you step off the ferry,” he advises, feeding bannock to his dogs, “keep left for the hotel.”

Mostly, they want Will to show them the way. Get a drink. Whatever. The ripened matrons of the market chide him for his chastity, because they do not understand its cause.

He turns away. Coloured crayons rainbow the basket at his feet. 

The store didn’t have any silver. 

It isn’t a problem, though. There’s no real need of it here.

 

Will’s shucking mussels when the hedge guy sits down at the bar, his scent green and ochre.

He’s there for a season, to mend fences. Migratory, tawny-plumed, and hooked of knife.

The elders shrugged at the intrusion, because every damned crofter can pleach, but artisans are never averted. It’s an old rule. 

Silent, scruffy, he dusted off the piano the first night he supped there. He knows plenty of airs, but has none. Three dawns have seen him, field-bound, crow-besieged, splicing together the stubborn hornbeams until the clouds overhead become as bloody as his hands. 

“Come back to my place, after closing?” Will asks. The songs to sea and seed are hymning like breakers around them. 

Shears make room for the bread and apples. 

Will cannot look, or reach out. He is stilled by longing, by want. But he can sense the single, slow nod as it seals his last wound shut.

Satisfied, and rising from a dream of blue, Will licks the brine from his fingers.

 

Where the moon cuts, blading through midnight glass, they join.

“You took your goddamn time.”

“I was not quite ready to murder myself, as you required.”

Grey down and crease; Will tastes every ticking moment of the man, reversal and progression, remembering, forgetting.

Hannibal has the decency to make a noise, the first word in their new language.

“The fall didn’t break me,” Will mutters. “You may yet.” The waiting came close, but they can’t begin this with apologies, so he bites to scar instead. 

Hannibal uses his thumbs. 

Will is salt, and a spiralling, claiming joy. 

The spread of his spine is a forgiveness. 

“I love you. If you can spare an hour, you can help out with tomorrow’s art class.”

The children tolerate the lecture on perspective.

It’s the endless yawning of their teacher and his friend that makes them laugh.

 

Flaws fit together. They bicker about blankets. Hold hands in the flurrying, gasping deep-water. 

Will can glance out of the schoolroom window and watch sun-shadows follow Hannibal, shirtless, sentinelled by wolfhounds, as he weaves sapling stalks in such a way that they cannot be parted. 

And their nights are like wild honeycomb, sweet, darkly golden, and effortlessly complex. 

 

Eventually, storms smoke the sky with cinnamon.

“You should have gone, already.”

Limbs heavy, and mingled, they lay raw from the rub of it. 

“When I come to this place again, I will not leave.” Hannibal untangles Will’s hair with calloused fingers. “If you will have me.”

Will winds himself in closer. “You were…afraid?”

“Rootstock can reject what is forced upon it. Grafts fail.”

“Not when bound.” 

Will chose for them, once. 

Now, he asks. Is accepted. And his mouth is a ring, enclosing everything.

 

The compass dances. The mainland mists away. Hannibal walks forward, and the dogs bark welcome as the ferry fades.

Growing things need tending. Will gives him back his instruments, oiled and sharpened, kept safe for his return. 

“You’re early.” Will glimmers in the light. “Come on home, and I’ll help you to unpack.”


End file.
